Launching ggscale
TL;DR:
I’m creating a new open source project called “ggscale”. It’s an open-source backend for multiplayer games. You get auth, storage, lobbies, matchmaking, leaderboards, an authoritative game-server fleet, a peer to peer relay, and you get all of it from a single Go binary with a flexible architecture.
Self-host it, or use our hosted ggscale cloud service. Apache 2.0 licensed.
Why
Do for multiplayer game hosting what WordPress did for the web. A free, open-source codebase you can run on a small VPS, plus a managed tier for people who’d rather not touch a server.
Games keep dying when they shouldn’t. A publisher pulls the plug on a live-service title and the thing just stops working. Auth was tied to PSN or Xbox or Steam or Epic. Progression lived behind a proprietary service. Matchmaking ran on something nobody outside the studio could see. Trying to retrofit a self-host path the week before the servers go dark is brutal, and I get why most studios don’t bother. Starting on an open backend on day one is a much smaller ask.
Who it’s for
Indie studios get a cheap backend with no lock-in. You skip the $600/month managed-Nakama bill and you skip the team that would otherwise rebuild Firebase from scratch.
Publishers winding down a title get a clean handoff path. The community can keep running the game on the same stack the studio used, and nobody has to write an offline-mode patch from scratch.
Player communities get to host their own server. Mods, regional servers, a setup for tournaments, a small one for a group of friends, whatever fits.
How it deploys
The control plane is a single Go binary. Drop it on a Linux box, point it at a Postgres URL, it runs. No Java or Python runtime to babysit. No Redis/Kafka/service-mesh sprawl. If you want your own dedicated game-server fleet, a second compose file adds k3s + Agones. If you’d rather not run any of it, ggscale Cloud is the hosted option.
The bet
I’d like the next wave of multiplayer games to outlive the studios that built them. That’s most of why this exists.
Code, docs, and roadmap: github.com/automoto/gg-scale
Site: ggscale.org